Sixth extinction

The sixth extinction designates the mass extinction event of biodiversity currently unfolding on Earth — the sixth in geological history, after the Ordovician-Silurian (443 Ma ago), the Devonian (372 Ma), the Permian-Triassic (252 Ma, the most catastrophic), the Triassic-Jurassic (201 Ma), and the Cretaceous-Paleogene (66 Ma, the end of the non-avian dinosaurs).

A few figures

• The current extinction rate of vertebrates is estimated at between 100 and 1000 times the geological background rate (Ceballos et al., 2017).
• Nearly 70 % of wild vertebrate populations have disappeared on average since 1970 (WWF, Living Planet Report 2022).
• One million animal and plant species are currently threatened with extinction (IPBES, 2019).

These figures are among the most contested and debated in contemporary science — not because the trend is in doubt, but because precision is difficult to establish and the political stakes are considerable.

The link with the human

Unlike the previous five — caused by geological, climatic, or astronomical events —, the sixth extinction is of anthropogenic origin. Its main causes:

1. Habitat destruction — deforestation, intensive agriculture, urbanization.
2. Overexploitation — fishing, hunting, harvesting.
3. Pollution — chemical, plastic, light, sound.
4. Invasive species — human displacements breaking equilibria.
5. Climate change — which now adds itself to the previous four and amplifies them (see climate crisis).

That is to say: the sixth extinction is the same historical chain as the industrial revolution, taken from its biospheric face. It is not collateral damage, it is the direct and structural consequence of the development model issuing from the steam-engine lineage.

What this changes for the ninth transition

The manifesto reads this extinction as a brutal reminder: industrial fiction has unfolded for two centuries without ever maintaining its coupling with the biosphere. The result is before our eyes. And it forces us to see the stakes of the cognitive phase differently.

If the cognitive noosphere proliferates without integrating what the sixth extinction teaches us, it will become a second layer of decoupling — informational instead of material, but with consequences at least as serious. If it orients itself toward maintaining the coupling with the living, it can become an instrument of repair.

This is a bifurcation, and it is being played out now.

Consequence for the Awen

The work of the circles explicitly includes the return to the substrate: presence to bodies, to non-human living beings, to finitudes. Not as therapy, not as poetic imagery — as discipline of coupling. This is what distinguishes the Awen from yet another intellectual or techno-philosophical movement: the reminder that everything that is thought must remain coupled to what carries it, failing which thought goes mad, and civilization collapses.